‘I’ve tried everything I could think of to reform her. I’ve put her into her bed when she does it. I’ve given her extra biscuits on the rare occasions when she doesn’t. But I really have to admit, I can’t change her behaviour patterns.’
‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could think of to say.
‘Thank you, but it’s embarrassing. Sir Jonathan Peebles, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons, did us the honour of coming to a small dinner party my wife and I gave a week or so ago. I’d hardly given him a glass of sherry before Rosemary fixed her teeth in the ends of his trousers.’
‘That was embarrassing?’ It seemed to be the wrong way round, having Mr Markby making a full confession to me and expecting help and reassurance.
‘Terribly embarrassing! They were fine trousers, I would say tailor-made. Savile Row. Scottish tweed, all that sort of thing. Rosemary obviously enjoyed getting her teeth into the ends of them. Sir Jonathan has perfect manners of course, but he was certainly irritated. He said something like, “Can’t you call your bloody dog off ?” I did my best of course, but I’ve simply failed to reform Rosemary.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And yet you’ve managed to reform this friend of yours.’
At first I didn’t see the connection. Lucy didn’t, so far as I knew, bite the ends of people’s trousers. But then I said, ‘I seem to have persuaded her.’
‘Persuaded her? That’s what you did.’ He seemed to be thinking hard about it all and then he came out with, ‘Perhaps that’s because you’ve been a criminal yourself. It takes one to reform one.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘So should I do some sort of crime and then I might do my job better?’
I looked at Mr Markby and I was amazed, quite honestly. A tall, sandy-haired man I couldn’t imagine climbing in through a kitchen window by night. He’d have been hopeless at it.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think you should.’
‘I was only joking.’ It was the first time in all my dealings with Mr Markby that I’d known him to make a joke. He dropped the idea of taking to crime and quite suddenly he asked me how old I was. When I hesitated he said, ‘I suppose you’re over twenty-five?’
I admitted it.
‘And I suppose you left school before A levels?’
I didn’t know what this was all about but I told him I’d been self-educated in Wormwood Scrubs.
‘So, A level passes wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe a Diploma in Probation Studies instead. You know what I’m talking about?’
I had to tell him I had absolutely no idea.
‘It’s just something to keep in mind for the future. We can discuss it when we meet again.’
But before we met again, something happened which changed everything.
23
My phone rang at the office and, after a small click which seemed to infect the telephones I used at work and at home, a voice said, ‘Is that Miss Purefoy? My name is Henry Parkinson.’
‘I’m Lucy Purefoy,’ I told him. ‘But who are you?’
‘I go under the nickname of Screwtop. I’ve been instructed to meet you concerning the lady coming out of the bath.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been expecting a call.’
‘We better have a meet. Shall we say 6.30 tomorrow in the Brummell Club?’
‘Is that safe? My friend Terry goes there. I wouldn’t want him to know.’
‘He won’t be there tomorrow evening. I can promise you that. He’ll be out at another job. I’ll be at the bar. Red hair, stocky build, sweet smile. You’ll recognize me.’ And he rang off.
As I put the phone down Julian at the next desk said, ‘Who’re you going to meet? Sounds as if you have a rather complicated love life.’
‘You can say that again,’ I told him.
In the days that followed, the fear and the excitement seemed to die away, and I remembered my date at the Brummell Club as though it was just another meeting with a client to discuss a campaign for an organic hair shampoo.
So I walked down Harrowby Street and passed the muscular chuckers-out with the feeling that I was going to just a routine meeting. But of course I couldn’t go into that place without thinking about Terry, and it was as if I was going back into a world I knew and where I felt at home, whereas I felt a sort of stranger in Robert’s palace or at drinks with the Smith-Aldeneys. I was in a place of deep shadows with pools of light over the gambling tables and from the ceiling over one end of the bar. There I saw a small hunched-up figure with red hair and a cheerful smile. As I got nearer he straightened his back and said, ‘You must be Lucy.’
I had to admit it. I had no choice in the matter.
‘Sit down then. We don’t want to shout about this, do we?’
I sat down on a high bar stool beside him. ‘And you must be Screwtop,’ I told him.
‘The governor likes to call me that.’ He smile died. ‘But I can tell you my brain’s 100 per cent when it comes to driving.’ He fell into a resentful sort of silence and, as he gave no signs of buying me a drink, I got myself a glass of white wine and a Bacardi Breezer, which Screwtop finally told me was his ‘usual poison’.
‘The governor says you’re to come along with us on the job.’ He looked doubtful. ‘We don’t usually take them with us. Not amateurs.’
‘I’m not exactly an amateur.’
‘Why, you done jobs before?’
‘One or two so far, yes.’ I didn’t tell him what Terry thought of my efforts at stealing. I was keen to get down to the details of my most ambitious project. ‘Anyway, I know where the owner keeps what we’re after.’
‘So where are we going then?’
‘It’s called God’s Acre Manor. It’s near Aldershot.’
‘How far out of London?’
‘About an hour if there’s no traffic.’
‘There won’t be much traffic at two in the morning.’
‘Is that when we’re going?’
‘Take your average house. Everyone’s asleep around three. Big family, is it?’
‘Only one.’
‘Single gent?’
‘You got it!’ I congratulated Screwtop. ‘Oh, and a man-servant, a sort of butler.’
‘Sleeps in the house?’
‘He drinks a lot of whisky. With any luck, he’ll be out for the count.’
‘Ground-floor kitchen, is there?’
‘Yes, at the back of the house.’
‘Sash windows?’
‘I think so. It’s an old manor house.’
‘And you say you know where the gent keeps - whatever we’re after?’
‘Oh yes. I know exactly where he keeps it.’
‘We’ll take Ozzy Desmond along with us. He knows his burglar alarms and he can act as a peterman.’
‘A what?’
‘Specialist in opening safes.’
‘It’s not in a safe.’
‘All the same, Ozzy’ll be useful. He knows his silver so we might pick up all we can, if you don’t mind.’ Screwtop asking my permission was definitely sarcastic. All the same, I said I didn’t mind.
‘All right then.’ Screwtop pulled out a Filofax and looked for a date in his diary. ‘Next Friday, 21 July, if that suits you?’
‘I’m sure it will.’ I hadn’t though it would be so soon.
‘Be in your car. What is it by the way?’
‘A Polo. A bit beaten up, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t worry. Always best to have an anonymous-looking motor. Be parked in the underground car park at Charing Cross. We’ll pick you up there at two. Don’t be late or anything.’
‘I won’t be.’
‘Wear dark clothes. Jeans and a sweater. Trainers on your feet not to make a noise. Gloves. You got all that?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve got it. I just wonder . . .’
‘What do you wonder?’
‘What I’m going to tell Terry about the night of the 21st, that’s all. It’s all come a bit soon.’
> ‘You’ll think of something, won’t you? You’re so clever.’
‘I don’t know about that. Will you have another drink?’
‘Better not.’ Screwtop suddenly felt the call of duty. ‘Better report to the governor. I think we’ve covered everything.’
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘I think we did.’
Then he was gone and I was alone in the Beau Brummell Club finishing a glass of white wine. I was aware of a figure leaving the shadows further down the bar and moving to sit next to me.
‘Ishmael!’ I said. ‘Is Deirdre with you?’
‘No. When I come to this place, I don’t bring Deirdre. It’s not her sort of thing at all.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t.’
‘You came here with a friend. I saw you.’
‘Not a friend. It was business. My advertising business.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ‘that’s what it must have been. For a moment I thought I recognized him. Must be mistaken.’
‘Sorry, Ishmael,’ I told him, ‘I’ve got to get back to Terry. I hope you understand.’
‘Yes, of course. Of course, I understand.’
I’ll say one thing for Deirdre’s Ishmael. Although he seemed to bob up everywhere, he was perfectly polite.
I told Terry I was going to a hen party in Aldershot. I know it was a lie but I’d planned that he’d know the truth soon enough, a truth that was going to bring us closer together than ever. ‘It might go on till quite late, so don’t wait up for me.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ He didn’t seem exactly pleased, but that was because he didn’t know what I was really going to do. ‘Who are these girls anyway?’
‘Oh, just people I used to know. Some of them I went to school with.’
‘And where’s this party taking place?’
Oh, if only he knew, I thought, he wouldn’t be cross-examining me as though he was some sort of police officer or magistrate or something. But I still wasn’t going to tell him until it was all safely over. If he even got a hint, I knew he’d be trying to stop me. But he went on looking at me suspiciously and he said, ‘You’re not going to see that Robin Thirkell, are you?’
‘Why do you ask me that?’ His question had made me a bit nervous.
‘You were all over him one time. Kissing, that’s how I remember it. And you had that lucky escape last time - or at least that’s what you told me!’
‘Well, I’m not going to see him, I hope. He’ll hardly be invited to a hen night.’ What I really meant was I hoped he didn’t see me. Anyway, I was getting tired of all these sulky questions about what was intended to be just a great night for both of us. I said, ‘You don’t mind me going out with the girls, do you?’
‘Of course not. You can come and go as you please.’ But he didn’t sound exactly sure about it.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘thank you very much.’ I pretended to be quite upset that he was questioning me about my movements. ‘Just you wait,’ was what I didn’t say, ‘until you see what I’m going to bring you back.’ Instead I turned the questioning on him. ‘So what are you doing this evening?’ I asked.
‘Staying in, I suppose.’ He did seem a bit sulky. ‘Perhaps read a book.’
‘Really? What are you going to read?’
‘Mr Markby gave me a book. All about the Probation Service. It’s about reforming people.’
‘You don’t want to read that, do you?’
‘I might have a look at it.’
‘I won’t be gone long. And then we’ll have more interesting things to discuss than the Probation Service,’ I promised him.
And then he smiled and said, ‘I’ll miss you,’ which was all I needed to speed me on my way.
The difficulty was knowing how to fill in the evening. You see, I had to leave Terry at what might be a reasonable time to set off for a hen party in Aldershot and my actual date wasn’t until two o’clock in the morning. Well, we were going to meet up and leave London about two o’clock in the morning.
I went and sat in the darkness of a cinema, watching car chases and shootings in a film with a story which I had too much else to think about to understand.
When I came out, I tried to feel the excitement Terry had described to me, but all I could think of was the long light July evening, which seemed to stretch out like a lifetime before me. I parked near the Close-Up Club and took my suitcase from the boot of the Polo. In the lavatory, I changed from my wrap-around dress, suitable for a hen night, into the jeans, black sweater and trainers that Screwtop had recommended. There was no Deirdre or Ishmael, in fact no one in there I knew at all. I had ordered a plate of pasta and thought that crime was rather like the National Health Service. There was a great deal of hanging about attached to it. I almost gave it all up then, but I remembered that by the morning I would truly have understood Terry, I would know exactly what he felt and we would be together completely, absolutely and for always. I finished the bottle of Valpolicella that came with the spaghetti and drove to the underground car park.
There was nothing to do but go to sleep in the car. I’d turned on the radio and bits of news from all over the world, war, death, skulduggery and starvation, drifted into the Polo. I switched it off and, suddenly tired, wondered what I was doing, alone in an underground car park, until I fell asleep.
I was woken up by someone knocking on the window. I turned my head and opened my eyes to see Screwtop’s grinning face on the other side of the glass. I opened the window and felt the first tingle of excitement that would grow on me during the night.
24
I don’t know why it was, but I couldn’t quite credit the story about the hen party. I got a feeling that I didn’t like at all that Lucy was lying to me. When we first met I wouldn’t have given a single solitary fart about that, but now it seemed that I cared very much, perhaps too much, as it turned out, for my own good, or certainly the good of Lucy.
Why didn’t I believe her? I suppose I’d seen so many of my friends and people I’d worked with telling lies in court. Made up stories about what they were doing on the night in question, faked alibis, any sort of ‘pork pies’, as Chippy used to call them in the days before he became Leonard. Anyway, they always told these lies with a sort of wide-eyed look of sincerity - the look Lucy gave me when she talked about the hen party in Aldershot. I mean, she’d never mentioned this lot of girl friends before. Yes, she’d mentioned her friend Deirdre, who she met for drinks at the Close-Up from time to time, but that was all.
Then I noticed that nearer the date she got, well, sort of excited. A lot of the time she seemed to be thinking of something else entirely and then she’d keep coming back to the subject, saying, ‘You don’t mind really, do you?’ or ‘I’m sure it’s better for our relationship that I do things on my own from time to time.’ What sort of things was she thinking of doing on her own? That was what I couldn’t help wondering. I suppose you’ll say I was unreasonably jealous, but just look at her previous. When we first met she had this boyfriend, Tom, who fizzled out but was no doubt somewhere still alive on the face of the earth. Then there was that Robin, who had his tongue halfway down her throat when I caught them kissing in the Intimate Bistro. I know he had tried his luck when she went for a dinner party in his big country house, and he had plenty of money. So was it another date with Robin that Lucy was getting so excited about?
I know what you’re going to say. That I was well in love with Lucy by this time and that was perfectly true. It all seemed to be going well. I was sure I’d put her off the habit of stealing little things which didn’t suit her at all. And life had never been better than it was in All Saints Road. I got used to cooking in the way I’d seen it done when I worked at the bistro. Lucy kept saying there was something needed to make us feel really close, but to be honest I felt close enough already. I’d have been quite happy to keep things going as they were. Which is why I got more than a little upset when she spun me what I suspected was a false alibi.
Then there
was the business of the suitcase. It was the evening before the alleged hen night. I was cooking in the kitchen and I looked out of the window and saw her put her small suitcase in the boot of the Polo. There was something about the way she did it, looking to see there was no one watching, as though she had blagged her own suitcase or something. When I asked her about it she got quite angry. ‘I told you I might have to stay the night with one of the girls,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter? Do you want to search my luggage? What are you, some sort of customs officer?’
I tried to calm her down by telling her that of course I didn’t mind her going to meet her girl friends and we sort of made things up, though I was still not entirely convinced. Then the time came when she put on her new wrap-around dress and set off in the Polo and I was left alone in the flat, still not quite sure she’d told me everything.
I went to bed quite early but I couldn’t sleep. Eventually it got to past two in the morning. I’d had a very restless few hours, thinking things over in my mind, imagining all kinds of stuff. I was still not sure of her, so I decided to ring her on her mobile. Perhaps, I thought, she’d still be up and partying with the girls.
Well, she must have pressed the green button to answer my call and I heard her voice and a man’s voice calling something I couldn’t quite hear. Then she cut me off and the line went dead. After that there was no point in trying to go to sleep.
25
The car which would become the getaway and was now the get-to-it was an anonymous Rover. I had been introduced to Ozzy Desmond, the peterman, the expert in getting into safes. Screwtop seemed a little in awe of Ozzy, who was, quite obviously, at the top of his profession. He was a tall, thin person with long, bony fingers who wound himself up in the seat next to the driver. He’d obviously decided neither to speak nor to look at me, as though I were a quite unnecessary complication in the job ahead, which, from his point of view, I suppose I was.
So I sat alone in the back of the car telling Screwtop, as we drove at speed but not, Screwtop assured me, ‘getaway speed’, the way I always went in my Polo out of London and towards my home. It was as we were crossing Clapham Common and Screwtop was asking me if I knew the house really well, a fact he seemed anxious to have confirmed, that my mobile rang in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out and must have pressed the green button as I answered Screwtop’s question: ‘Know God’s Acre well?’ ‘Every inch of it,’ I told him. Then I put the phone to my ear and heard Terry’s voice as Screwtop almost shouted from the front of the car, ‘Put that bloody thing away. Don’t answer it.’
Quite Honestly Page 13
